Exceeding My Grasp

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? Robert Browning

This is not my attempt to win The Turner Prize.

Unless they WANT to give me that prize…

Putting LED lighting into some little n-scale models is easy… but in others it’s practically impossible without special tools and access to a human brain.

The Minitrix U-28C was born under an unlucky star and continues to damn all men who come under its spell. Oddly (for us, not them) Trix decided to make a shell for this model that represented the fascinating General Electric U-30CG (no seriously, it’s fascinating, I’m not being sarcastic).

The U-30CG was a locomotive designed for the Santa Fe railroad to pull passenger cars, even though it looked, dag-nabbit, like a freight engine. So they made it “fatter” so it would look like a passenger loco.

Such was the state of play around 1968, as the world collapsed (actually, it was just changing). Kind of like now.

Anyway, back to business. The Minitrix U-30CG shell goes on the U-28 chassis and you get some room to play with for installing lights and so on.

But it’s not enough, really. The Germans’ don’t like making things with “spare” room. They like everything to FIT. So the chassis of that little model provides very little space to install lights or anything else.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

I replaced the gray plastic windows with ones made from Testors Window Maker:

This stuff is just about the best all-around glue I’ve ever used. Works good for gluing canopies, too.

I picked up my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and read a little about “gumption traps” this morning. Learning new things is always a process of bouncing off the walls like a pinball until to get into a groove. Then you can move on to another learning experience, or just enjoy the groove for a while.

Groovy.

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